19-year-old Eugene Simon plays Jerome on House of Anubis. It's kind of a mystery/soap opera/fantasy set in a British boarding school, so it's got a little of everything. We spoke to Eugene about the show, about his own boarding school experiences with bullies, his favorite American fast food, and the best advice he ever got.

It was three years of subtle but intense bullying that was orchestrated by one character who had a real problem with me, and essentially used people’s fear of him to turn them against me. He was a kind of ringleader who turned about 10 of my friends against me, and I left with no real friends. But as sad as that sounds, I learned a lot, you know, and it happens to the best of us. Everyone to some degree has been bullied at school. I think the most important thing is you take something away from it, an understanding of people and how shallow they can be sometimes.

A lot of attention was drawn towards me because I arrived as "the actor." I was called Eugene Simon, Child Actor. I never really got the opportunity to be me because I was labeled. [After that] when I went to my new boarding school, I loved it because I never told anybody that I was an actor. I allowed them to get to know me first, and then one day one of my friends said, “Eugene, are you in something called My Family and Other Animals?” And then they all suddenly found out that I was an actor. But they got to know me by this point. They knew who I was, not what I was, which is important.